Setting up Samba

onOctober 13, 2005

What is Samba?

“Samba is an Open Source/Free Software suite that provides seamless file and print services to SMB/CIFS clients.” Samba is freely available, unlike other SMB/CIFS implementations, and allows for interoperability between Linux/Unix servers and Windows-based clientsOr for the less geekish – Samba simply allows you, from your Linux box, to access folders, files and printers on a Windoze box on your network.

Please note that this is a basic setup of samba and doesn’t take many security issues into consideration. Once you have it up and running you can then tighten up the security.

[homes] #Make your /home directories accessible to the users who own them browsable = no read only = no map archive = no

[data] path = /export/data #Enter any other Linux directories you want to share here read only = no map archive = no

# end

2. Setup Samba to Run at Startup

chmod 755 /etc/rc.d/rc.samba

[Either reboot or run killall -TERM smbd /etc/rc.d/rc.samba start

to start and stop the server.]

3. Setup a Samba User

smbpasswd -a username

4. Login to Samba

smbclient //localhost/data

If you are able to login, you now should be able to see the ‘data’ directory from Windows, assuming you are setup your workgroup properly and are logging into your Windows system with the same username and password you log into Linux with.